stolen focus

this is not about anti-technology or anti-ambition. It is pro-focus, pro-intention, and pro-discernment in how we understand broader historical contexts and apply the affordances of modern technology and media to our own ambitions. This is a call to reclaim our attention as a finite, precious resource.

We must strategically protect and take aim with our attention, not just because it’s the lens through which we see, but because it’s the architecture of our reality.

Nelson Cowan, a leading researcher on working memory, tells us the Magic Number is 4±1. Meaning, we can only focus our attention on three to five meaningful chunks of information before our cognitive capacity overflows.

students on their phones take fewer notes and retain less information from class. Other research has shown that “task-switching” between social media and homework is correlated with lower GPAs and that students whose cellphones are taken away in experimental settings do better on tests.

If there is sort of a sadness for people—I don’t know what, under forty-five or something?—it has to do with pleasure and achievement and entertainment. And a kind of emptiness at the heart of what they thought was going on....

Contemplative space is hard to define. Contemplation is generally not a practice that offers immediate jolts of anything. There’s (well, usually) no chatty/ethery response from on high, no neatly cleared path unfurling after a good long think. In fact, more often it feels like “nothing” at all is happening in that open space. The “soft”... See more